With the death of Jimmy Carter has come a deluge of absurd historical revisionism from the national media. As the story goes, the former president, who is often considered the worst person to hold the office in American history, has been unfairly maligned, with his great achievements ignored in favor of right-wing sensationalism. 

ALSO SEE: Biden's Remarks on Jimmy Carter's Death 

In the contest of which press outlet could beclown themselves the most over the subject, Washington Monthy took the gold. Using a picture of Ronald Reagan drawn as an ape, Jimmy Carter is shown towering over him with the headline "The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter." Believe it or not, the body of the article is even worse. 

But that negative assessment is beginning to change. Recently, Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah hosted a conversation between Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, two journalists who just published major biographies of America’s 39th president. Each approached Carter from a different angle, but both arrived at a similar conclusion: Jimmy Carter is seriously underrated. 

Alter and Bird both dispute that Carter was weak or lost in the weeds, as he has so often been portrayed. Carter brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since; signed more legislation than any post–World War II president except LBJ; and warned of the dangers of climate change before the threat even had a name. Carter’s human rights policy played a huge and largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union—more so, perhaps, than any policies enacted by his successor Ronald Reagan.

I first caught wind of this piece on Monday, and I'm still in awe of that last paragraph. Actual real-life human beings are trying to give Jimmy Carter more credit for the fall of the Soviet Union than President Ronald Wilson Reagan. What do you even do with that? Do you bother to offer a critique or just laugh hysterically? 

I suppose my job is to do the former so it should be noted that Carter was most responsible for the rise of the Mullahs in Iran, having completely undercut the Shah. He also spent his presidency establishing a Palestinian status quo that has led to numerous wars and countless deaths. To suggest he "brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since" is one of the most insane things I've ever seen a news outlet write. Further, his coddling of Islamist dictators while continually knee-capping Israel (many suggest he was outright antisemitic) laid the groundwork for the chaos in the region that persists to this day.

As to the Soviet Union, it was ascendant when Carter left office, running roughshod in multiple parts of the world. The SALT II treaty was also signed under Carter, which served as nothing more than unilateral disarmament by the United States while the Soviets didn't comply. It took Reagan's peace-through-strength strategy to bring the Soviets to their knees because, if anything, Carter was helping preserve the Soviet Union's power with his naive half-measures and deal-making. 

Keep in mind that we are only talking about Carter's foreign policy record at this point. His domestic record was arguably worse, though I won't dive into that here. 

With that out of the way, let's get to Scott Jennings, who was faced with pro-Jimmy Carter talking points multiple times on CNN following the former president's passing. Instead of shying away from controversy, which would have been easy to do given the circumstances, he struck hard and set the record straight. 

JENNINGS: In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, he wrote letters to all of our allies and to Arab states, asking them to abandon their cooperation and coalition with the United States of America. If it's not treasonous, it's borderline treasonous, and so I hear what you're saying about the humanitarianism, but when you're an ex-president, and you have served in that office, I think you have a duty to the United States and only to the United States, and when he did that and other instances, to me, it showed that he cared more about his own legacy than he did about the country, and I think that is wrong.

I'll admit to not being aware that Carter did that, and to be frank, it changes my view of him. I had previously held the idea that the former president wasn't a bad person but was way in over his head in terms of competency. But the more you dig into his history, the more apparent it becomes that his "failures" weren't just mistakes but were active attempts by him to undermine the country he supposedly loved so much. 

If you'd like to see everything Jennings had to say, he goes into even more detail in the full clip.

At the end of the day, people can make the argument that Carter's insanely destructive policies and viewpoints, which he continued to push long after he left office, were truly the result of one of a historic case of naivete. Given some of the things Jennings mentions, I'm finding that harder and harder to believe, but even so, what you can't argue is that he was secretly a good president. 

He was an awful president regarding both the direct outcomes and moral implications of his policies. That he built houses for the less fortunate, a noble goal, does not erase that history. These attempts to paint him as greater than Reagan are mind-numbingly stupid, and they once again show the press lacks any and all credibility.